Scarborough's Reading Rope is made up of lower and upper strands. When all these component parts intertwine it results in skilled and accurate, fluent reading with strong comprehension.
The lower strands include:
- Phonological awareness - It's a skill set that includes identifying and manipulating units of oral language – parts such as words, syllables, onsets, and rimes. Did you know that you can improve your students’ ability to read unfamiliar words without showing them a single printed letter?
- Decoding - Decoding is the ability to apply knowledge of sound-letter relationships (phonics) to correctly pronounce written words.
- Sight recognition - Our sight word memory is also referred to as our orthographic lexicon, which includes all the words we can read accurately and effortlessly.
The upper strands include:
- Background knowledge - Background knowledge is an essential component in learning because it helps us make sense of new ideas and experiences. Readers rely on background knowledge to attend to and make sense of what they are reading. This is especially important for readers who are still relying heavily on word decoding rather than rapid word recognition. H
- Vocabulary - An extensive and rich vocabulary enables readers to make sense of what they are reading. A reader with rich auditory and oral vocabularies will find it easier to read through texts that contain words they have not seen in print before.
- Language structures - Syntax- The arrangement of words in a phrase or sentence. The English language has patterns and rules for the way we order our words. Semantics - In linguistics, semantics is the study of the meanings of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Knowledge of the meaning of a text is essential to reading.
- Verbal reasoning
- Inference - a conclusion one can draw from known facts or evidence
- Metaphor - a word or phrase used to say that something is another thing in order to suggest that they are similar
- Literacy Knowledge
- Print Concepts - letters vs. words, 1:1 correspondence, reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom, spaces between written words, letter order matters, etc.
- Genres of Literature – different types of books or stories defined by special characteristics
